Daily TIP

The Daily TIP: "The Israel Resolution"

Posted by Tip Staff - September 12, 2018

"The Israel Resolution"UN Confirms 33 Chemical Attacks, Constituting War Crimes, by Syrian Regime Since 2013White House: U.S. Will Hold Iran "Accountable" for Attacks by Proxies on American InterestsAfghan Man Arranges for Five-Year-Old Girl to Get Life-Saving Heart Surgery in Israel

"The Israel Resolution"

On April 16, the Durham City Council passed the Israel Resolution making Durham the first city in the United States to boycott police trainings specifically with Israel – the only Jewish majority country on the planet.

It matters because, as I write this, there are efforts under way to bring the same boycott to the Washington D.C. City Council, as anti-Israel activists seek to ban nationwide the collaboration between U.S. law enforcement and the Israeli police.

On November 8th, 2017 the deceptively named Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organized protests in 15 different cities across the U.S. to demand that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) end the "DeadlyExchanges.” The cities included: St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, New Haven, Denver, Seattle, New York, and Chicago among others.

This past April, the campaign marked its first success in this effort in Durham, NC where I work and where my family attends synagogue. The mainstream Jewish Community undertook an effort to block the boycott. Now the city has finally begun responding to public record requests I made well over 100 days ago.

With this information, we now know that on April 4, Mayor Steve Schewel set aside just one hour in the morning on his calendar to “Write [the] Israel Resolution” that would be published the very next day. On April 9, four days after the Council’s statement was published, Mayor Pro Tempore and City Council member Jillian Johnson described this policy to a local synagogue president as “the Israel Resolution.”

The United Nations reported Wednesday that the Assad regime in Syria continues to use chemical weapons against civilian targets, including three chlorine gas attacks on a rebel-held Damascus suburb and on Idlib province this year that constitute war crimes, The Jerusalem Postreported.

The latest evidence brings to 39 the total number of chemical attacks registered by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria since 2013. 33 atrocities were conclusively attributed to the Syrian regime.

"To recapture eastern Ghouta in April, government forces launched numerous indiscriminate attacks in densely populated civilian areas, which included the use of chemical weapons," the U.N. report said.

"The Commission concludes that, on these two occasions, government forces and or affiliated militias committed the war crimes of using prohibited weapons and launching indiscriminate attacks in civilian-populated areas in eastern Ghouta," U.N. officials added.

Weaponized chlorine is considered a chemical weapon and its use is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, ratified by Syria, and under international law.

In the northwest province of Idlib – where the regime and Russian forces are gearing up for an all-out assault on the last rebel stronghold – chlorine was also used on February 4, the U.N. report said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday that the Syrian regime has been warned against any chemical weapons use in an anticipated assault on Idlib province. “In Idlib, we’re watching very closely what the Assad regime, aided and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians are up to there,” Mattis told Pentagon reporters.

White House: U.S. Will Hold Iran "Accountable" for Attacks by Proxies on American Interests

Following the recent attacks on Kurdish targets as well as American interests in Iraq by Iranian proxies, the White House issued a statement saying that it would hold Iran "accountable" for injuries to American personnel or damage to United States facilities and that it would act "decisively" against such attacks, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday.

Over the weekend, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired ballistic missiles at targets in Iranian Kurdistan and in Erbil of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq killing at least a dozen people. In reaction to the attacks, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence condemned them as an Iranian "effort to threaten and destabilize its closest neighbor."

On Friday, mortars hit the green-zone in Baghdad, which is described as an "ultra-secure" installation that houses both Iraqi government offices as well as the U.S. embassy to Iraq.

Iraqi authorities said that no one was reported injured in the mortar attack.

On Saturday, unidentified attackers fired Katyusha rockets at the airport of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, which houses the U.S. consulate there.

Citing the two attacks, the White House statement blamed Iran, explaining, "Iran did not act to stop these attacks by its proxies in Iraq, which it has supported with funding, training, and weapons."

The White House statement said that it would hold Iran "accountable" for any attack that harmed U.S. personnel or property, adding that in the case of such damage, "America will respond swiftly and decisively in defense of American lives."

Afghan Man Arranges for Five-Year-Old Girl to Get Life-Saving Heart Surgery in Israel

Noorina is five years old and lives in Afghanistan. In July, her father brought her to Israel for lifesaving heart surgery arranged by Save a Child’s Heart (SACH), an Israeli medical charity based at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.

When she is older, Noorina may be surprised to learn that an Afghan stranger willingly put himself and his family at risk to give her the gift of health.

Noorina was the fifth child from Afghanistan sent to SACH through the efforts of that same young Muslim father, who asked ISRAEL21c to call him Jangzapali, a pseudonym to hide his true identity.

“Jangzapali,” he explains, “means ‘victim of war.’”

Jangzapali is involved in all types of charity work and has built up an international social-media network over the past few years. Children needing urgent medical care are his top priority.

“Almost 10,000 [medical need] cases are registered with the Afghan Red Crescent. They are unable to do all cases, so through our broad network on social media, we arrange surgery for poor children in Afghanistan or India. For complicated cases they cannot handle, we work with Save a Child’s Heart,” he says.

The actual cost of each child’s care is $15,000, covered entirely by donations.

The first Israeli NGO ever to win a UN Population Award, SACH was founded in 1995 and has treated more than 4,800 children from 57 countries, Gaza and the Palestinian Authority territories, and trains cardiology teams from those countries.